Digital Studies and Digital Art students at Davidson making cyborg interfaces with Makey Makeys and toys.

The Digital Studies program at Davidson College is growing! We now offer an interdisciplinary minor and, through our Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS), an interdisciplinary major. Last year Digital Studies and the History Department partnered on a tenure-track search—leading to Dr. Jakub Kabala joining Davidson as a digital medievalist with a background in computational philology and digital spatial analysis.

I’m delighted to announce that Digital Studies is collaborating once again on a tenure line search, this time with the Art Department. Along with Jakub and myself, this position will form the core of the Digital Studies faculty. My vision for Digital Studies has always emphasized three areas: (1) the history, practice, and critique of digital methodologies; (2) the study of cultural texts, media, and practices made possible by modern technology; and (3) the design and creation of digital art and new media, which includes robotics, interactive installations, and physical computing. Roughly speaking, I think of these three areas in terms of methodology, culture, and creativity. This latest tenure track search addresses the last area, though of course the areas blur into each other in very interesting ways.

Here is the official search ad for the digital artist position. Please share widely!

Davidson College invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Art and Digital Studies, with a specialization in interactive installation, transmedia art, robotics, data art, physical computing, or a similar creative field. Artists must demonstrate a distinguished record of creative work and a commitment to undergraduate education. Preference will be given to artists with a broad understanding of contemporary trends in Digital and New Media Art, including its history, theory, and practice. MFA by August 1, 2016 is required.

This tenure-track position is shared between the Art Department and Digital Studies Program. Art and Digital Studies at Davidson explore the contemporary technologies that shape daily life, focusing on critical making and digital culture. The successful applicant will teach in both Studio Art and Digital Studies. The candidate’s letter of application should highlight experiences that speak to both roles. The teaching load is 5 courses per year (reduced to 4 courses the first year). Classes include introductory and advanced digital art studio courses, as well as classes that focus on digital theory and practice.

Apply online at http://jobs.davidson.edu/. A complete application includes a letter of application, CV, artist’s statement, teaching philosophy, and a list of three or more references. In addition, submit links for up to 20 still images or up to 7 minutes of video in lieu of a portfolio. The application deadline is December 1, 2015. Do not send letters of reference until requested.

Davidson is strongly committed to achieving excellence and cultural diversity and welcomes applications from women, members of minority groups, and others who would bring additional dimensions to the college’s mission. Consistently ranked among the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, Davidson College is a highly selective, independent liberal arts college located in Davidson, North Carolina, close to the city of Charlotte. Davidson faculty enjoy a low student-faculty ratio, emphasis on and appreciation of excellence in teaching, and a collegial, respectful atmosphere that honors academic achievement and integrity.

This summer I attended the first annual Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) at Hamilton College. It was an inspiring conference, highlighting the importance of collaborative faculty/student digital work at small liberal arts colleges. My own school, Davidson College, had a team at ILiADS (Professor Suzanne Churchill, Instructional Technologist Kristen Eshleman, and undergraduate Andrew Rikard, working on a digital project about the modernist poet Mina Loy). Meanwhile I was at the institute to deliver the keynote address on the final day. Here is the text of my keynote, called “Your Mistake was a Vital Connection: Oblique Strategies for the Digital Humanities.”

Forty years ago, the musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt published the first edition of what they called Oblique Strategies.Oblique Strategies resembled a deck of playing cards, each card black on one side, and white on the other, with a short aphoristic suggestion on the white side.

These suggestions were the strategies—the oblique strategies—for overcoming creative blocks or artistic challenges. The instructions that came with the cards described their use: “They can be used as a pack…or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case, the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.”

When we look at some of the strategies from the original deck of 55 cards, we can see why their appropriateness might appear unclear:

Make sure nobody wants it.

Cut a vital connection

Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame

Do something boring

Honor thy error as a hidden intention

And one of my favorites:

Repetition is a form of change.

Brian Eno explained the origins of the cards in an interview on KPFA radio in San Francisco in 1980: The cards were a system designed to, as Eno put it, “foil the critic” in himself and to “encourage the child.” They were strategies for catching our internal critics off-guard. Eno elaborated:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.

If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn’t the case—it’s just the most obvious and—apparently—reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

Other ways of working. There are other ways of working. That’s what the Oblique Strategies remind us. Eno and Schmidt released a second edition in 1978 and a third edition in 1979, the year before Schmidt suddenly died. Each edition varied slightly. New strategies appeared, others were removed or revised.

For example, the 2nd edition saw the addition of “Go outside. Shut the door.” A 5th edition in 2001 added the strategy “Make something implied more definite (reinforce, duplicate).” For a complete history of the various editions, check out Gregory Taylor’s indispensable Obliquely Stratigraphic Record. The cards—though issued in limited, numbered, editions—were legendary, and even more to the point, they were actually used.

David Bowie famously kept a deck of the cards on hand when he recorded his Berlin albums of the late seventies. His producer for these experimental albums was none other than Brian Eno. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know about Bowie’s use of the Oblique Strategies

I knew about Tristan Tzara’s suggestion in the 1920s to write poetry by pulling words out of a bag. I knew about Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, which profoundly influenced William Burroughs. I knew about John Cage’s experimental compositions, such as his Motor Vehicle Sundown, a piece orchestrated by “any number of vehicles arranged outdoors.” Or Cage’s use of chance operations, in which lists of random numbers from Bell Labs determined musical elements like pitch, amplitude, and duration. I knew how Jackson Mac Low similarly used random numbers to generate his poetry, in particular relying on a book called A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates to supply him with the random numbers (Zweig 85).

I knew about the poet Alison Knowles’ “The House of Dust,” which is a kind of computer-generated cut-up written in Fortran in 1967. I even knew that Thom Yorke composed many of the lyrics of Radiohead’s Kid A using Tristan Tzara’s method, substituting a top hat for a bag.

But I hadn’t heard encountered Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. Which just goes to show, however much history you think you know—about art, about DH, about pedagogy, about literature, about whatever—you don’t know the half of it. And I suppose the ahistorical methodology of chance operations is part of their appeal. Every roll of the dice, every shuffle of the cards, every random number starts anew. In his magisterial—and quite frankly, seemingly random—Arcades Project, Benjamin devotes an entire section to gambling, where his collection of extracts circles around the essence of gambling. “The basic principle…of gambling…consists in this,” says Alain in one of Benjamin’s extracts, “…each round is independent of the one preceding…. Gambling strenuously denies all acquired conditions, all antecedents…pointing to previous actions…. Gambling rejects the weighty past” (Benjamin 512). Every game is cordoned off from the next. Every game begins from the beginning. Every game requires that history disappear.

That’s the goal of the Oblique Strategies—to clear a space where your own creative history doesn’t stand in the way of you moving forward in new directions. Now in art, chance operations may be all well and good, even revered. But what does something like the Oblique Strategies have to do with the reason we’re here this week: research, scholarship, the production of knowledge? After all, isn’t rejecting “the weighty past” an anathema to the liberal arts?

Well, I think one answer goes back to Eno’s characterization of the Oblique Strategies: there are other ways of working. We can approach the research questions that animate us indirectly, at an angle. Forget the head-on approach for a while.

One way of working that I’ve increasingly become convinced is a legitimate—and much-needed form of scholarship—is deformance. Lisa Samuels and Jerry McGann coined this word, a portmanteau of deform and performance. It’s an interpretative concept premised upon deliberately misreading a text. For example, reading a poem backwards line-by-line. As Samuels and McGann put it, reading backwards “short circuits” our usual way of reading a text and “reinstalls the text—any text, prose or verse—as a performative event, a made thing” (Samuels & McGann 30). Reading backwards revitalizes a text, revealing its constructedness, its seams, edges, and working parts.

Let me give you an example of deformance. Mary Lee and Katharine are two social media stars, with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter each. They’re also great white sharks in the Atlantic Ocean, tagged with geotrackers by the non-profit research group OCEARCH. Whenever either of the sharks—or any of the dozens of other sharks that OCEARCH has tagged—surfaces longer than 90 seconds, the tags ping geo-orbiting satellites three times in order to triangulate a position. That data is then shared in real-time on OCEARCH’s site or app.

OCEARCH Tracking Map (screenshot)

The sharks’ Twitter accounts, I should say, are operated by humans. They’ll interact with followers, post updates about the sharks, tweet shark facts, and so on. But these official Mary Lee and Katharine accounts don’t automatically tweet the sharks’ location updates.

Sometime this summer—well, actually, it was during shark week—I thought wouldn’t it be cool to create a little bot, a little autonomous program, that automatically tweeted Mary Lee and Katharine’s location updates. But first I needed to get the data itself. I was able to reverse engineer OCEARCH’s website to find an undocumented API, a kind of programming interface that allows computer programs to talk to each other and share data with each other. OCEARCH’s database gives you raw JSON datathat looks like this to a human reader:

But to a computer reader, it looks like this:

Structured data is a thing of beauty.

Reverse engineering the OCEARCH API is not the deformance I’m talking about here. What I found when the bot started tweeting location updates of these two famous sharks was, it was kind of boring. Every few days one of the sharks would surface long enough to get a position, it would post to Twitter, and that was that.

Something was missing. I wanted to give this Twitter account texture, a sense of personality. I decided to make Mary Lee and Katharine writers. And they would share their writing with the world on this Twitter account. The only problem is, I don’t have time to be a ghost writer for two great white sharks.

So I’ll let a computer do that.

I asked some friends for ideas of source material to use as deformance pieces for the sharks. These would be texts that I could mangle or remix in order to come up with original work that I would attribute to the sharks. A friend suggested American Psycho—an intriguing choice for a pair of sharks, but not quite the vibe I was after. Mary Lee and Katharine are female sharks. I wanted to use women writers. Then Amanda French suggested Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day, which just happens to feature two characters named Katharine and Mary. It was perfect, and the results are magical.

Now, Katharine tweets odd mashed-up fragments from Night and Day, each one paired with historical location data from OCEARCH’s database. On December 9, 2014, Katharine was very close to the shore near Rhode Island, and she “wrote” this:

Katharine: Down all luxuriance and plenty to the verge of decency; and in the night, bereft of life
(09-Dec-2014) pic.twitter.com/SEEsv3FBKm

In every case, the journal part of the tweet—the writing—is extracted randomly from complete text of Night and Day and then mangled by a Python program. These fragments, paired with the location and the character of a shark, stand on their own, and become new literary material. But they also expose the seams of the original source.

Mary Lee follows the cut-up method described by Brion Gysin decades ago. I’ve made a database of 1,288 lines of H.D.’s most anthologized poetry. Every tweet from Mary Lee is some combination of three of those 1,288 lines, along with slight typographic formatting. All in all, there are potentially 2 billion, 136 million and 719 thousand original poems that Mary Lee could write.

What kind of project is @shark_girls? Is it a public humanities project—sharing actual data—dates, locations, maps—that helps people to think differently about wildlife, about the environment, about the interactions between humans and nature? Is it an art project, generating new, standalone postmodern poetry and prose? Is it a literary project, that lets us see Virginia Woolf and H.D. in a new light? Is it all three?

I’ll let other people decide. We can’t get too hung up on labels. What’s important to me is that whatever @shark_girls is about, it’s also about something else. As Susan Sontag wrote about literature: “whatever is happening, something else is always going on.” And the oblique nature of deformance will often point toward that something else. Deformance is a kind of oblique strategy for reading a poem. If the Oblique Strategies deck had a card for deformance it might read:

Work backwards.

Or maybe, simply,

Shuffle.

Another kind of deformance—another oblique strategy for reading—are Markov Chains. Markov chains are statistical models of texts or numbers, based on probability. Let’s say we have the text of Moby Dick.

Just eyeballing the first page we can see that certain words are more likely to be followed by some words than other words. For example, the pronoun “I” is likely to be followed by the verb “find” but not the word “the.” A two-gram Markov Chain looks at the way one pair of words is likely to be followed by a second pair of words. So the pair “I find” is likely to be followed by “myself growing” but not the pair of words “me Ishmael.” A three-gram Markov parses the source text into word triplets. The chain part of a Markov Chain happens when one of these triplets is followed by another triplet, but not necessarily the same triplet that appears in the source text. And then another triplet. And another. It’s a deterministic way to create texts, with each new block of the chain independent of the preceding blocks. Talk about rejecting the weighty past. If you work with a big enough source text, the algorithm generates sentences that are grammatically correct but often nonsensical.

Let’s generate some Markov chains of Moby Dick on the spot. Here’s a little script I made. If it takes a few seconds to load, that’s because every time it runs, it’s reading the entire text of Moby Dick and calculating all the statistical models on the fly. Then spitting out a 3-, 4-, or 5-gram Markov chain. The script tells you what kind of Markov n-gram it is. The script is fun to play around with, and I’ve used it to teach what I call deep textual hacks. When I show literature folks this deformance and teach them how to replace Moby Dick with a text from their own field or time period, they’re invariably delighted. When I show history folks this deformance and teach them how to replace Moby Dick with a primary source from their own field or time period, they’re invariably horrified. History stresses attentiveness to the nuances of a primary source document, not the way you can mangle that very same primary source. Yet, also invariably, my history colleagues realize what Samuels and McGann write about literary deformance is true of historical deformance as well: deformance revitalizes the original text and lets us see it fresh.

All of this suggests what ought to be another one of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies:

Misreading is a form of reading.

And to go further, misreading can be a form of critical reading.

Now, let me get to the heart of the matter. I’ve been talking chance operations, deterministic algorithms, and other oblique strategies as a way to explore cultural texts and artifacts. But how do these oblique strategies fit in with the digital humanities? How might oblique strategies not only be another way to work in general, but specifically, another way to work with the digital scholarship and pedagogy we might otherwise more comfortably approach head-on, as Brian Eno put it.

Think about how we value—or say we value—serendipity in higher education. We often praise serendipity as a tool for discovery. When faculty hear that books are going into off-site storage, their first reaction is, how are we going to stumble upon new books when browsing the shelves?

A recent piece by the digital humanities Victorianist Paul Fyfe argues that serendipity has been operationalized, built right into the tools we use to discover new works and new connections between works (Fyfe 262). Serendipomatic, for example, is an online tool that came out of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. You can dump in your entire Zotero library, or even just a selection of text, and Serendipomatic will find sources from the Digital Public Library of America or Europeana that are connected—even if obliquely—to your citations. Let your sources surprise you, the tagline goes.

Tim Sherratt has created a number of bots that tweet out random finds from the National Library of Australia. I’ve done the same with the Digital Public Library of America, creating a bot that posts random items from the DPLA.Similarly, there’s @BookImages, which tweets random cat-pics images from the 3.3 million public domain images from pre-1922 books that the Internet Archive uploaded to Flickr.

But in all these cases, serendipity is a tool for discovery, not a mode of work itself. We think of serendipity as a way to discover knowledge, but not as a way to generate knowledge. This is where the oblique strategies come into play. They’re not strategies for discovery, they’re practices for creativity.

Let me state it simply: what if we did the exact opposite of what many of you have spent the entire week doing. Many of you have been here a whole week, thinking hard and working hard—which are not necessarily the same thing—trying to fulfill a vision, or at the very least, sketch out a vision. That is good. That is fine, necessary work. But what if we surrendered our vision and approached our digital work obliquely—even, blindly.

I’m imagining a kind of dada DH. A gonzo DH. Weird DH. Which is in fact the name of a panel I put together for the 2016 MLA in Austin in January. As I wrote in the CFP, “What would an avant-garde digital humanities look like? What might weird DH reveal that mainstream DH leaves out? Is DH weird enough already? Can we weird it more?”

My own answer to that last question is, yes. Yes, we can. Weird it more. The folks on the panel: Micki Kaufman, Shane Denson, Kim Knight, Jeremy Justus will all be sharing work that challenges our expectations about the research process, about the final product of scholarship, and even what counts as knowledge itself, as opposed to simply data, or information.

So many of the methodologies we use in the digital humanities come from the social sciences—network analysis, data visualization, GIS and mapping, computational linguistics. And that’s all good and I am 100 percent supportive of borrowing methodological approaches. But why do we only borrow from the sciences? What if—and this is maybe my broader point today—what if we look for inspiration and even answers from art? From artists. From musicians and poets, sculptors and quilters.

And this takes me back to my earlier question: what might a set of oblique strategies—originally formulated by a musician and an artist—look like for the digital humanities?

Well, we could simply take the existing oblique strategies and apply them to our own work.

Do something boring.

Maybe that’s something we already do. But I think we need a set of DH-specific oblique strategies. My first thought was to subject the original Oblique Strategies to the same kind of deterministic algorithm that I showed you with Moby-Dick, that is, Markov chains.

Here are a few of the Markov Chained Oblique Strategies my algorithm generated:

Breathe more human. Where is the you do?

Make what’s perfect more than nothing for as ‘safe’ and continue consistently.

Your mistake was a vital connection.

I love the koan-like feeling of these statements. The last one made so much sense that I worked it into the title of my talk: your mistake was a vital connection. And I truly believe this: our mistakes, in our teaching, in our research, are in fact vital connections. Connections binding us to each other, connections between domains of knowledge, connections between different iterations of our own work.

But however much I like these mangled oblique strategies, they don’t really speak specifically about our work in the digital humanities. So in the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to create DH-specific oblique strategies, programmatically.

The great thing about Markov chains is that you can combine multiple source texts, and the algorithm will treat them equally. My Moby Dick Markov Chains came from the entire text of the novel, but there’s no reason I couldn’t also dump in the text of Sense and Sensibility, creating a procedurally-generated mashup that combines n-grams from both novels into something we might call Moby Sense.

So I’m going to try something for my conclusion. And I have no idea if this is going to work. This could be a complete and utter failure. Altogether, taking into account the different editions of the Oblique Strategies, there are 155 different strategies. I’m going to combine those lines with texts that have circulated through the digital humanities community in the past few years. This source material includes Digital_Humanities, The Digital Humanities Manifesto, and a new project on Critical DH and Social Justice, among other texts. (All the sources are linked below.) I’ve thrown all these texts together in order to algorithmically generate my new DH-focused oblique strategies.

[At this point in my keynote I started playing around with the Oblique DH Generator. The version I debuted is on a stand-alone site, but I’ve also embedded it below. My talk concluded—tapered off?—as I kept generating new strategies and riffing on them. We then moved to a lively Q&A period, where I elaborated on some of the more, um, oblique themes of my talk. As nicely as this format worked at ILiADS, it doesn’t make for a very satisfying conclusion here. So I’ll wrap up with a new, equally unsatisfying conclusion, and then you can play with the generator below. And draw your own conclusions.]

My conclusion is this, then. A series a oblique strategies for the digital humanities that are themselves obliquely generated. The generator below is what I call a webtoy. But I’ve also been thinking about it as what Ted Nelson calls a “thinkertoy”—a toy that helps you think and “envision complex alternatives” (Dream Machines 52). In this case, the thinkertoy suggests alternative approaches to the digital humanities, both as a practice and as a construct (See Kirschenbaum on the DH construct). And it’s also just plain fun. For, as one of the generated oblique strategies for DH says, Build bridges between the doom and the scholarship. And what better way to do that than playing around?

I’m at the Electronic Literature Organization’s annual conference in Bergen, Norway, where I hope to capture some “think aloud” readings of electronic literature (e-lit) by artists, writers, and scholars. I’ve mentioned this little project elsewhere, but it bears more explanation.

The think aloud protocol is an important pedagogical tool, famously used by Sam Wineburg to uncover the differences in interpretative strategies between novice historians and professional historians reading historical documents (see Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Temple University Press, 2001).

The essence of a think aloud is this: the reader articulates (“thinks aloud”) every stray, tangential, and possibly central thought that goes through their head as they encounter a new text for the first time. The idea is to capture the complicated thinking that goes on when we interpret an unfamiliar cultural artifact—to make visible (or audible) the usually invisible processes of interpretation and analysis.

Once the think aloud is recorded, it can itself be analyzed, so that others can see the interpretive moves people make as they negotiate understanding (or misunderstanding). The real pedagogical treasure of the think aloud is not any individual reading of a new text, but rather the recurring meaning-making strategies that become apparent across all of the think alouds.

By capturing these think alouds at the ELO conference, I’m building a set of models for engaging in electronic literature. This will be invaluable to undergraduate students, whose first reaction to experimental literature is most frequently befuddlement.

If you are attending ELO 2015 and wish to participate, please contact me (samplereality at gmail, @samplereality on Twitter, or just grab me at the conference). We’ll duck into a quiet space, and I’ll video you reading an unfamiliar piece of e-lit, maybe from either volume one or volume two of the Electronic Literature Collection, or possibly an iPad work of e-lit. It won’t take long: 5-7 minutes tops. I’ll be around through Saturday, and I hope to capture a half dozen or so of these think alouds. The more, the better.

On Saturday, April 18, I gave the following talk at Bard College, as part of Bard’s Experimental Humanities Mellon lecture series. Sorry if it doesn’t read as an “academic” talk. It’s written to be told.

I’m going to tell you a story today about zombies and the liberal arts. There are a lot of places I could begin—say, the huge number of classes in the humanities that focus on zombies, or the burgeoning field of zombie scholarship. But I’m going to take a more circuitous route, a kind of lurching, shambling path to connect the dots. The story begins in 2013. That’s the year the film adaptation of Max Brook’s World War Z came out. It’s the year The Last of Us became a bestselling game for the Sony Playstation. It’s also the year Pat McCrory, the North Carolina Governor—my home state governor—was a guest on Bill Bennett’s radio talk show to talk about his vision for the North Carolina public university system. Chapel Hill. NC State. UNC-Charlotte. McCrory told Bennett—who, if your memory goes back that far, was Reagan’s Secretary of Education, he told Bennett that “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”[footnote]Kevin Kiley. “North Carolina Governor Joins Chorus of Republicans Critical of Liberal Arts.” Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2013. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/30/north-carolina-governor-joins-chorus-republicans-critical-liberal-arts.[/footnote] Continue reading ““Warning: Infected inside, do not enter”Zombies and the Liberal Arts“→

I put “deep” in scare quotes but really, all three words should have quotes around them—”deep” “textual” “hacks”—because all three are contested, unstable terms. The workshop is hands-on, but I imagine we’ll have a chance to talk about the more theoretical concerns of hacking texts. The workshop is inspired by an assignment from my Hacking, Remixing, and Design class at Davidson, where I challenge students to create works of literary deformance that are complex, intense, connected, and shareable. (Hey, look, more contested terms! Or at the very least, ambiguous terms.)

We don’t have much time for this workshop. In this kind of constrained setting I’ve found it helps to begin with templates, rather than creating something from scratch. I’ve also decided we’ll steer clear of Python—what I’ve been using recently for my own literary deformances—and work instead in the browser. That means Javascript. Say what you want about Javascript but you can’t deny that Daniel Howe’s RiTA library is a powerful tool for algorithmic literary play. But we don’t even need RiTA for our first “hack”:

What’s great about “Taroko Gorge” is how easy it is to hack. Dozens have done it, including me. All you need is a browser and a text editor. Nick never explicitly released the code of “Taroko Gorge” under a free software license, but it’s readily available to anyone who views the HTML source of the poem’s web page. Lean and elegantly coded, with self-evident algorithms and a clearly demarcated word list, the endless poem lends itself to reappropriation. Simply altering the word list (the paradigmatic axis) creates an entirely different randomly generated poem, while the underlying sentence structure (the syntagmatic axis) remains the same.

This little generator is essentially half of @_LostBuoy_. It generates Markov chains from a source text, in this case, Moby-Dick. What’s a Markov chain? It’s a probabilistic chain of n-grams, that is, words. The algorithm examines a source text and figures out which word or words are likely to follow another word or other words. The “n” in n-gram refers to the number of words you want the algorithm to look for. For example, a bi-gram Markov chain calculates which pair of words are likely to follow another pair of words. Using this technique, you can string together sentences, paragraphs, or entire novels. The higher the “n” the more likely the output is to resemble the source material—and by extension, sensible English. Whereas “Taroko Gorge” plays with the paradigmatic axis (substitution), Markov chains play along the syntagmatic axis (sentence structure). There are various ways to calculate Markov chains; creating a Markov chain generator is even a common Intro to Computer Science assignment. I didn’t build my own generator, and you don’t have to either. I use RiTA, a Javascript (and Processing) library that works in the browser, with helpful documentation.

The final deformance is a web-based version of the popular @JustToSayBot:

And I have a challenge here: thanks to the 140-character limit of Twitter, the bot version of this poem is missing the middle verse. The web has no such limit, of course, so nothing is stopping workshop participants from adding the missing verse. Such a restorative act of hacking would be, in a sense, a de-deformance, that is, making my original deformance less deformative, more like the original.

Here is a list of more or less digitally-oriented sessions at the upcoming Modern Language Association convention. These sessions address digital culture, digital tools, and digital methodology, played out across the domains of research, pedagogy, and scholarly communication. If I’ve overlooked a session, let me know in the comments. You might also be interested in my short reflection on how the 2015 program stacks up against previous MLA programs. Continue reading “Digital Humanities at MLA 2015Vancouver, January 8-10“→